NetBSD/mvme68k History

Originally ported by Chuck Cranor based on Paul Mackerras' old
DA30 code, NetBSD/mvme68k has been supported since the
NetBSD 1.1 release.

The NetBSD/mvme68k 1.1 release was fairly basic; running as a
diskless NFS client with no SCSI or parallel printer support, and
only two of the four serial ports working. The boot process was
quite long-winded; transfer a first-stage bootloader using srecords
over a serial port from a second host computer, transfer a second-stage
bootloader using TFTP over the ethernet from the server, finally
grab the kernel from the mvme68k root file-system image on the NFS
server.

At about this time, Steve
Woodford discovered NetBSD/mvme68k
and over the coming months added SCSI and parallel printer support.
Booting from SCSI disk was first supported in the 1.2 release,
although the system still had to be installed using the original
netboot method described above due to problems with booting from
tape.

Up to and including the
NetBSD 1.2 releases, the NetBSD/mvme68k release sets
consisted of a couple of compressed tar files; one for root, the other
for /usr. As of
NetBSD 1.3,
however, the release follows the official NetBSD convention,
including a comprehensive installation script. Additionally, booting from
SCSI tape is now supported, so an NFS server is no longer required to enable
system installation.